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World No Tobacco Day

I just checked the cupboard where I keep my supplies and my stash is still there so it seems their little ploy isn't working.

The WHO are celebrating today by screaming about the illegal trade in tobacco. They are also screaming about wanting to increase the cost of the said tobacco. Now in the hermetically sealed world of the Tobacco Control Industry, this may make sense, but in the real world the laws of economics apply – if your prices are too high then your customers will go elsewhere and you don't combat this by raising your prices further. Elementary, my dear Watson.

Of course the WHO have the ides that if you keep raising prices and stop the illicit trade that people will be forced to quit smoking. This ain't gonna happen for the simple reason that if there is a demand, there will be a supply and the more they clamp down on smuggling, the more devious the smugglers will become. The more the price is increased, the greater the incentive to smuggle.

Today is also the day that ASH starts its "Wrinkler" campaign. Doubtless Twitter will be alive with the anti-smokers hugging each other and congratulating themselves on this stroke of genius? They will all tweet about how funny it is and how clever it is and I'm happy for them. It's nice to see something bringing some joy into their sad little lives.

For a while now they have been hauling some bloke around the States dressed as a pink blob. I'm not quite sure of the concept here and I'm not sure what impact a pink blob will have on the world at large, but the Antis were having orgasms over him and frantically tweeted about him at every opportunity. But there again I get the strong impression that these gimmicks are just for their own amusement and a good way to spend the massive grants they get from the taxpayers' ill gotten gains.

The face of ASH?

At least the Wrinker thing will give the bloke in the blob a bit of a rest? Poor chap.

I have seen that Wrinkler video described as a "hilarious parody" [hilarious??]. Does that make my wee post on Friday a hilarious parody on a hilarious parody?

I did a wee search for "the wrinkler" on Google yesterday.

My little effort appeared on the first page in the top ten alongside ASH..

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Comments

World No Tobacco Day — 12 Comments

Well I'll tell ya' what! Today is Brian's got no tobacco day. Shit! I'm outta' fags and I don't get paid until Wednesday. So the question becomes, do I drive all the way up to Linda's house and bum a pack from her. She rolls her own and rolls them 200 at a time.

Fuck the WHO and ASH and all the Anti's who think their shit doesn't stink!

Really miss smoking …I gave up 4 years 11 months and three weeks ago (approx.) because my work – even at the advanced age of 63 – is physical and requires puff, but by Christ do I miss it. I find that hanging off a bottle of Grouse like a fruit-bat dulls the longing. A bit.

Caratacus, I'm 66 this month, and as a sole-trader carpenter I'm finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the physical demands of my job. However, giving up smoking is not currently on the agenda – my problems stem more from arthritic knee joints than lung capacity. I find smoking helps me concentrate. If I make a mistake, it can prove to be very costly, as I am often working with expensive materials. At this stage in my life, even if I believed the propaganda emanating from Tobacco Control (which I don't), I think it would be rather a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted to give up smoking now. After all, I started when I was about eight. But oddly, arthritic knees notwithstanding, I'm in surprisingly rude health. Flatteringly, I'm often thought to be ten years younger than I am. Which is actually doubly surprising given my history of drug abuse when I was younger.

And I still neck a bottle of red wine on a daily basis, although I have to admit to having given up drinking during the day. It just demotivates me and makes me tired these days, so I confine my drinking to the evenings when I've finished for the day.

As for this 'World No Tobacco Day' (never heard of it before today, thankfully), sorry, we don't do that sort of silliness here in Greece. Not surprisingly really, since Greece occupies the number one spot in the world for annual per capita cigarette consumption.

nisakiman – understand fully. I'm a sole trader too (totally unemployable now; the days when I would take orders from some spotty graduate or know-nothing manager unable to tie their shoelaces unaided are long gone) but I do shift a great deal of weight by hand every day. Shifting upwards of four or five tons per day in lumps varying from 50-200lbs on to the back of a Transit pickup – without the aid of a tail-lift (robs the amount I can carry) – it got to the point where I would be breathing, snorting and farting like an old warhorse whilst propped against the side of the truck. Since packing in the ciggies the breathing's got easier and I can keep the old body going for a bit longer 🙂

Seriously, though, ASH and their ilk do need to be a bit careful with campaigns like these, because when they conflict so starkly with the evidence of people’s own senses, they tend to fail pretty spectacularly and to be quietly shelved.

I don’t know if you remember, but some years ago (but post-ban) there was a rather limp effort to try and convince people that smokers were more overweight than non-smokers (some hideously-tortured statistics about waist sizes was the starting-point, if my memory serves me correctly). I don’t think a single paper ran with it and it certainly wasn’t mentioned on the TV or radio, because I think they knew how laughable it would be and they didn’t want to damage their credibility by airing it, seeing as one of the most obvious signs that someone’s given up the weed is their immediate and seemingly exponential increase in girth.

Ditto the whole “stink” campaign. It doesn’t take Einstein to work out that if every new doctor you ever visit has to ask you whether you smoke or not, then clearly smokers don’t “stink” all the time as per the insinuation in that particular campaign. If that was the case, there’d be no need for them to ask, would there? Just ask any non-smoker which of their work colleagues or mild acquaintances smoke and nine times out of ten they won’t even know. Surely the “stink” should tell them exactly who smokes and who doesn’t. (Close friends and relatives, of course, they tend to know about anyway one way or the other, so the test doesn’t work for them).

And so it’ll be with this “wrinker” campaign. The antis might not like it, but the most youthful-looking and attractive people do tend to always be the smokers (think Joanna Lumley and Nigella Lawson and, as per your previous post on the subject, David Bowie), whereas the unattractive ones who look like they need a bit of steam-ironing to get rid of a few years tend to be the non-smokers (think of any notably anti-smoking MP and you’ll get an idea of the “non-smokers’ look.” Something to do with constantly clenched teeth, tightly pursed lips and lots of disapproving frowning perhaps).

Maybe the antis are scraping the barrel for new ideas, now that all of the “invisible” illnesses in the world are a “done deal,” as they’ve already been blamed on smoking. But it’s much easier to blame something that people can’t see, hear, smell or feel on some mythical evil than it is to convince them that the evidence of their own eyes is in fact incorrect. But, hey, I guess they’ve got to keep coming up with new campaigns, no matter how far-fetched, in order to justify yet more of the taxpayers’ hard-earned cash. And at least campaigns like these show them up for the swivel-eyed zealots that they truly are …

The problem is that a lot of dimwits believe what they read despite the evidence of their own experiences. They see a headline screaming "Crossing the road can be fatal" and they'll be reluctant to cross a road again despite having done it successfully thousands of times.

When you look at some of the claims made by the Antis such as a few seconds of exposure to passive smoke can cause a heart attack and [my favourite] that smoke can travel through walls and telephone cables you just wonder how incredibly dense people can be. I had one commenter here a good while back who berated me from a height at my attitudes. He claimed he was a prisoner in his own house and that his daughter had serious respiratory problems. Why? Because his next door neighbour smoked and the smoke was coming through the walls.

The problem with the Antis is that they are in a win-win situation. If smoking rates fall, they claim their efforts are a resounding success, that the fall is entirely down to their efforts and that they must have tons more money to continue this success. If on the other hand rates don't fall, then they must redouble their efforts and must have tons more cash.